KINGSVIEW

THANKFUL FOR
GRATITUDE, WIND, AND COLD FRONTS

Michael A. King

What I’m thankful for is the gift of gratitude, and that’s what I want to talk about. But first I stress that it’s not, like some types of mashed potatoes, an instant gift, a powder we can mix at will with a splash of water and wolf down. For most of us, I think, it takes a lot of living, and often a lot of breaking, to sense the gift beginning to spread its treasure through our days.

As we start out, gratitude tends not to be our first reaction to life. Any parent knows being taken for granted by children is at a minimum in competition with getting their thanks. My own boyhood self thought about how much smarter I was than my parents far more often than about how grateful for them I was. We tend to yearn toward what we hope is coming more than to be happy for what is.

On a related note, I wonder if it isn’t particularly a tendency for men, especially younger men, to glory in achievement, to flinch from failure, to evaluate our worth according to how heroic a role we’re playing in our life stories. Women friends tell me they too, however, though sometimes in different forms, find themselves now and again pursuing that rising arc. So, one way or another, I’d guess most humans experience a need to shine somehow in the world’s tale and preferably to glow even brighter and higher up than we do now.

That’s why, when gratitude begins to grow, we may at first not grasp what a gift is entering our days. Like an orchard grower who has always sold oranges but never heard of apples, we may have little idea at first how to value the apple of thankfulness. But as each bite grows sweeter, we realize what we hold is the magic fruit Digory (in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew) finds growing in Narnia and takes back to England to heal his dying mother.

This at least has been my experience. There is really nothing new in what I’m saying here. I’ve heard it all my life. Pick up any human interest magazine, and you’ll find yet one more story like mine.

Yet as basic as it is, I’ve taken only tiny bites of gratitude throughout my life. Only at midlife am I more fully appreciating its value, and even now I’d guess I’ve only begun.

I first really woke up to the power of gratitude when one day I focused, truly focused, on the feel of the wind blowing and the look of it as it was made visible in the dance of tree leaves. I’ve always loved wind; that wasn’t so new. But this time I experienced what a gift that wind was. I realized what a dream come true it can be just to feel the wind. I understood that right then, not just that special day long gone, not just that longed-for day still to come, I was living a dream, a good dream, that dream in which the air itself seems alight with joy.

What drew me into the dream was gratitude. As I felt grateful for the wind, I felt myself, in a sense, enter a relationship with it, to be happy that there we were together, not only the two of us but everything the wind was touching.

Having been reading the journals of Edward Abbey, novelist and environmentalist prophet, who gloried much as I do in wind but felt that to see God in it is to flee the beauty of this world for never-never land, I respect those for whom what there is to be grateful for is wind. Period. Abbey’s own focus on wind as wind teaches me much.

Yet that day when the wind became gift I also couldn’t help feeling this: in relating to one another, I and wind were experiencing not just each other but the one who on creating the earth gratefully saw, says Genesis, “that it was good.”

I do confess I’m grateful in different ways for different winds. My ancestors came from Switzerland, from up in the Alps surrounded by sighing pines, I like to think. Maybe that’s why I love especially the winds that blow in from the north and the west, down from Canada and even the North Pole, bringing skies so blue and sweet it seems almost as if a divine brush is right then still joyously painting them into existence. When that wind touches your skin, cool and soft just as sun offers its contrasting warmth, what is left to say but “Thank you”?

Other times heat and humidity rise or gales lash. Then my gratitude shifts. A challenge raised by being grateful even for wind is how to get any work done. So thank God also for winds that drive me, guilt-free, indoors to meetings or my computer.

I could go on. I could talk of how once you learn to be grateful for wind, ever more beauty dances into view. Each cloud. Each leaf. Each little flower that opens. Daughters filling the house with life the increasingly rare times, now that their college years are arriving, they’re all home. That tender look their mother gives me just then. The gently wise support my conference minister offers when I’m not sure how to get through that thicket of congregational issues.

I could go on, but maybe that’s enough, for now, to make the point: when you learn to be grateful, you still want somehow to make your mark and matter in the world. You still want to dream dreams and seek visions. But oftener now you realize you’re already dwelling in them, that you don’t need to work as hard as you once thought to be at the center of them, that just being you can be a gift to others, much as wind blesses just by blowing. And then you breathe a prayer of thanks.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.